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I somehow ran accross this blog about what went wrong for APB. Pretty interesting since I tend to forget that games are more than a bunch of guys succeeding or failing to make a good game.Anyone else know of other good behind the scenes, why this game is terrible type of articles?

There was an excellent article about why Spore was so disappointing here, but apparently EA/Maxis do not care enough to fix their website anymore and so you just get an Error now.

Essentially it showed early game screenshots compared to the actual game. I try to remember some:

PV: Maxis showed screenshots of creatures with whole skeletons.

RV: Every creature has just one backbone.

PV: Maxis promised a complex ecological balance of herbivore and omnivore creatures in the creature phase.

RV: No interaction between creatures at all. The NPC creatures just hang around their nest waiting to get flirted with ore killed.

PV: Tribes develope their own unique culture.

RV: All tribe phases feel pretty much alike. You can either destroy other tribes or win the mover by offering gifts and playing a music-mini game. No unique culture in sight

I think there were some more, but I can't think of them right now.

It was pretty much just Maxis promising one of the greatest games ever (playing evolution!), then EA putting a deadline on it and every game phase (except the first primal stage) gets cut down to minimum fun.

The creature, tribal and civ stages in particular were all so underwhelming compared to what they had said and previewed. There was no depth at all. There was always 2 options (kill everything or dance at them until they smiled) and how you went about things was black and white. If you decided to dance your way to success you evolved/bought/wore the one thing that had those stats. If you want to kill stuff, you choose the killing stats and ignore everything else.

I think Maxis got carried away by their engine (which admittedly was very clever) and started talking about near limitless possibilities, then they realised that there was no way to do that with their budget and time limits, but by then it was too late, everyone had in their mind what spore was going to be and it fell very flat when it landed.

Yes, that covers pretty much my experience as well. I played it some time ago again and have to say that the universe phase (last one) is kind of good again - mostly because the game is getting like 4000% more complex. But just colonizing planets to... colonize more planets is just boring after some time.

Also the AI is pretty dumb. Short example:

I wiped one of my AI allies from a sector by destroying their whole (really shitty) colonized planet and everyone declared war on me and wouldn't stop attacking me even after I devastated every single one of their home worlds.

I have about 10 planet destroying devices ready to wipe you off the universe, but please keep on attacking my colonies... ಠ_ಠ

Spot on! My late game experience was basically just flying around in circles from one of my colonies to the next one, picking up the gas from one colony and selling it at another one.

And although all my colonies had one of these defense turrets they would still constantly harass me about how they were in great danger! WTF? There's a whole uber-turret defending the planet and every city has maxed out cannons as defense, but you still feel the need to call me when one lonely pirate ship appears?!

Also, I found it ridiculous that you couldn't establish (normal) trade routes. The ones ingame could just be used to buy ridiculously overpriced colonies from your allies (an unhabitable planet with one colony making no money on it? "I give you 1,000,000 for it" - "No way! Are you trying to insult us?? This means WAR!" - again... WTF, AI??).

I remember I just thought that if anyone could pull it off it would be Will Wright, since he had such great success with The Sims.

I mean, they actually implemented some great ideas imo: Although the creature editor was cut in many aspects it was still pretty good.
Animations were calculated regardless of how many legs the creature had, etc.

I don't think that's true necessarily. I think the current method of making games is on the way out. I was skeptical at first, but considering that total game sales took a dip this year (from what I've gathered) and many IP's are not selling too great, I'm starting to believe it.

As a video game developer who is also starting my own company, I found his hubris galling. If he wanted to be successful, he should have been a lot more careful. Instead, he was reckless and he paid for it, with 75 million taxpayer dollars, while all the time preaching smaller government and personal responsibility. The dude's a hypocrite and a fool- I don't feel bad for him at all.

While those are fair criticism's of the person, it still doesn't make it any better that such a great game performed poorly. The studio was clearly talented and had potential; it just didn't have a chance to break into the mainstream.

The game actually did fairly well, but because of dumb decisions they had to sell a huge amount that is ridiculous for an RPG that is a new IP. The fact they were developing an MMO which took a huge portion of their money was very stupid.

By contrast, Runic Games also had an ambitious goal of creating IP toward a future MMORPG. It developed Torchlight quickly and with little money, but it nonetheless received good reviews and solid sales. Runic postponed the MMOG because it felt like that was the prudent thing to do; three years later Torchlight II is out and the company decided to not develop a MMOG, at least for the time being. Maybe that didn't work out, but Runic does have two well-known games and didn't go bust in the process.

MMOG seem like giant sink holes for money where only a few properties make much money. I think the concept is interesting but requires massive logistics and capital to pull off and even then decent money is far from likely.

I don't know the budget that Runic had either. With Kingdoms, they were putting up a lot of money to make a AAA MMORPG. Based from what I've seen with the Torchlight games, I doubt they had the same budget and I doubt they were trying to do an MMO on the same level as Kingdoms. I think its very good that torchlight has been a success though.

They did make a real nice chunk of change with Torchlight. They probably could have afforded to go forward on the MMORPG front, but the developers said (I think it was on the AMA here, actually) that they decided not to considering all the high profile failures of MMOs in recent years and the overall number of MMOs on the market.

It was pretty much just smart decision making. Schilling, on the other hand, wanted to push forward and make his dream game without any consideration for the problems they'd face. I feel bad for the devs behind KoA. It could've been a pretty good series if the company didn't tank hard.

He's not really as big a bastard as people are making him out to be. He made the mistake of funding a giant game to try to fund an even bigger game, setting up a massive studio and giving his employees benefits above and beyond most game devs, and essentially wasted a ton of taxpayer money by being a bad businessman. He did severely screw up, but he deeply regrets it, by all appearances.

Pretty much everywhere, really. The long and short of itis that he started his own video game company and just went completely overboard. Rather than have modest buildings and such he built a massive expensive complex, hired incredibly expensive people to develop for him, etc. He basically guaranteed that no matter how well Amalur did it would never do well enough.

He and what happened to his company are pretty well known in Rhode Island ever since it blew up along with some 75 Million of our foolishly handed out tax payer dollars :P Not sure if it was big news outside the state.

Edit: Here are some articles about 38 Studios in the Providence Journal. Not sure where you would find a single comprehensive write up of what happened, but I am sure there are several out there.

Actually I don't believe it was Kingdoms of Amulur which sank the company. IIRC, their primary goal was to create an MMO and that's where they sank the vast majority of their funds - the MMO just never saw the light of the day because the company sank before they could get anything other than KoA out the door (and I believe they purchased KoA when it was already mostly completed).

Actually part of the issue was the high threshold of "enough copies" for a new IP. They spent the dev money on their MMO, hoping to recoup investment by putting out this single player game, and thus lost money. That was one of their poor business decisions right there.

It didn't sell that poorly if you look at hard numbers. They anticipated greater profit than they got.

That would be difficult, since it released in February. Besides, launch windows didn't really have anything to do with it, 38 Studios' downfall was mostly a combination of mediocre to average sales, trying to develop an MMO at the same time as KOA, and something to do with Rhode Island taxes or loans or the like which I forget now.

Christ knows. I think they were planning to have KOA set up the universe and story for the MMO (Project Copernicus) they were developing at the same time, but that always seemed way to optimistic for a team the size of 38 Studios, even with Schilling's entire life fortune.

CEO left 1 week before launch because "he didnt want to risk the posibility of a flop on his hands".
Funcom stock plummets around launch time, alot of people got fired.

The game was decent. It got decent reviews and had deent amount of players.
Funcom have since announced that "The secret world" is profitable at this point. So they have dug their way out of the dirt. They also announced that they will only develop smaller games in the future. Mobile and facebook games are less risky compared to a mmo with a weird launch.

Don't take all this as fact. Google around for some articles about Funcom's business and The Secret World's launch. I can't link to that many sites, as they are all in Norwegian.

There were a lot of problems with TSW's business model that scared people off. Most MMOs these days have either a box price and subscription (WoW), a box price and cash shop (GW2), or a subscription and cash shop (SW:TOR). TSW tried to have all three.

The prices were significantly above those of other MMOs, which would mean it'd have to be true WoW-killer to draw many people in. Started off at £12.99, then got dropped to £11.49, but when most other MMOs are £8.99 or less, it does rather put people off.

WoW kinda got away with for the same reason Team Fortress 2 got away with it before it went free to play, it already existed, it was what it was, and everybody who was playing or looking into getting into had ample amount of knowledge of whether or not it was worth at all, The Secret World however, completely new game, getting into it unsure if you'll even like it, and feeling the constant of "I just paid 60 bucks for this, I'll be paying 15 more bucks each month, and there's also more cash I could spent in the shop" - now I didn't play TSW at all, but Cash Shop always sounds nagging because it's done so wrong so often.

Also, WoW's cash shop, honestly an insanely smooth launch/transition for a cash shop, because they didn't make a cash shop. They made a premium mount, then a premium pet, and I don't know what they're up to these days, it didn't feel like they added a cash shop, just cosmetics, and you knew it was just cosmetics from day one, because it was a cosmetic.

I'd also like to add on the end here about the WoW TCG special items, which also made the concept of paid for cosmetic a lot more acceptable to WoW players at the time, in my opinion, at the very least.

Even if it's pretty much the exact same, Blizzard has enough people in their pocket to excuse that. I don't know if you play WoW, but a huge amount of the playerbase from what I've seen is willing to shell out the extra for those pets and star ponies.

No amount of window dressing would help get over the terrible gameplay. It was a MMO that actively discourages multiplayer. My wife and I played together and we found that nearly all the quests require that we complete them twice or they even broke because only one of us could get a key item or enter a special area. This happened so frequently we stopped doing anything in a party.
Not to mention that the auction house was completely broken, the game ran like garbage on decent PCs, and as soon as you finish the first area, there is no more VO and far less interesting quests. Like they spent all their time polishing the first act then ran out of time or money.

I remember playing this and couldn't run dungeons because some of the dungeons had this instakilling wall of death that wasn't even visible on lower graphics settings. And my computer at the time couldn't handle higher than the lowest.

Apparently there was a lot of review baiting. That is early game content was 90% of the content and they knew most reviewers wouldn't have enough time to go beyond that and the ones that did wouldn't get their reviews out until well after launch. They concentrated on early content then hoped revenue from launching would help them build out the content.

No a bad plan, not even that deceptive but the users out paced the content very quickly which lead to a lot of discontent. I'm not sure how it's doing now but there was a huge shit storm about it before.

Did you play it trough? Because I actually preferred the last zones. And I didn't have the feeling the quality changed. I even had fun in the engame instances though I'm usually more a PvP guy. They were pretty good designed. Though there is not much of a raid content for that crowd. And unfortunately I think PvP sucked in that game. It is still a pretty good game overall and feels quite refreshing unlike most other recent MMOs.

The game was tons of fun till the endgame PvE became repetitive. But thats just every non PvP MMO for me. And even the repetitive part in TSW was fun for some time because you character keept developing and was fun to play with different builds.

You should play it. It is really a good game and a nice setting. And that is from someone who actually prefers high fantasy. There are some parts I didn't like so much, like instanced zones (which are in most recent games). But especially for people that aren't so much into MMOs this would be more of a pro. It is even a good game if you just play it as single player. It has the best quest I ever encountered in any MMO ever. The combat system is not the best but it is ok and quite refreshing. I know players who didn't like it at first because for a good build you need to do quite some theorycrafting. But in the later beta stages when they introduced the decks that changed. They are quite decent and you can just pick your preferred playstyle and roll with it.

I didn't stick around for too long (in MMO times speaking) because their endgame bored me pretty quick but I still like the game. And it makes me sad that it wasn't more of a commercial success. They really did something good, tried new things and set themselves apart from being just another clone.

About all that it has a subscription and an item shop. Yes it has. But not as you might think. Equip works differently and in the item shops are non game changing items. Just cosmetic. But there are still great looking items ingame so you don't feel pushed towards buying. And the subscription fee is worth it. I played since the early beta stages and never had any bigger problems with the game. I prefer this over any F2P with items shops as the only source to make money because they push you or they won't make any money.

Oh it explains it, he has numerous bad moves and flops. But it's easy to see, Doom was a huge success, but everyone thought they produced it themselves. A level designer of all people thought he created the success..

There was also a guy named Paul Steed, who had the same opinion of himself. His big claim to fame was the crackwhore skin..

What happened to John Romero also happened to George Broussard with Duke Nukem forever. It was outrageous crippling success and then a struggle to chase that down again. They were each the #1 designer for a period of time in the industry and their Egos desperately wanted that again.

This lead them to a curious sort of perfectionism that can't survive in Games. In a way but not exactly it was what gripped Francis Ford Coppola with Apocalypse Now. Where the directors are so invested in a project that they constantly revise their vision.

For film the end product can turn out okay; for Games it will always be a catastrophe because the technology has a shelf life and the audience has constantly shifting expectations. All due to the pace of technological improvement.

The pace of change has ebbed a lot but when DaiKatana and Duke Nukem Forever projects started it was in a exponential phase.

Both had the same problem where they wanted to be bleeding edge and lead the industry. So whenever a cool idea was introduced by a peer they HAD to incorporate it or else face a game that might not be bleeding edge. This meant constant design changes and constant rework all up and down the chain. This meant delays which pushed things until someone else released something new which you might have to again redesign to compete with. At certain points your technology just becomes irrelevant. Q1 engine to Q2 engine to Unreal Engine engine etc...

The core mantra Ion Storm had was the problem: "Design is King". Clearly that philosophy doesn't work. ID in it's heyday balanced design, technology, and business pressures and Romero hated that his design took a back seat once projects hit the home stretch. He went on to demonstrate why you have to make that compromise.

Romero also had a lot of business issues as well. In addition to making an ambitious game he also had an ambitious plan for growing a company.

Jesus Christ this guy is full of himself. He acts like he's the only one with the moral sensibility and critical depth to slam Duke Nukem Forever for being unfunny and morally repugnant. The vast majority of the reviews did exactly that - even Zero Punctuation riffed on it.

Brutal Legend had horribly misguided marketing, to the point where many so-called gamers still don't know it was always supposed to be a multiplayer RTS in the vein of Sacrifice. Most people think the RTS was "shoehorned in" and "ruined a great campaign" when it was done perfectly for its chosen style of RTS and the campaign was just training.

It did come as a shock for those not following the development. I heard 'Tim Schafer' and pre-ordered. Heard 'Jack Black', 'Tim Curry', and 'Metal' and got even more excited, but resisted the urge to spoil anything. Had a blast, got frustrated at some of the RTS components but really enjoyed the world, learning curve, dialogue, and . . . well, I got something different than I was expecting, but still enjoyed it quite a bit. I'm glad that it got me back into some active RTS elements. Very ambitious.

To be fair, I'm a huge DoubleFine fan and I found the design choices really strange. I was expecting a Zelda-like adventure game and didn't mind the RTS stuff (I'm actually at 99% completion for single player, but I got that PS3 bug that EA never patched). Though having played through it, I still think it would have been more satisfying as an action/adventure game. Especially considering the universe.

A lot of this misinformed perception was due to the demo not showing any of the RTS gameplay. I loved the game, but I probably wouldn't have gotten it if I knew from the get-go that it was an RTS (I suck at them).

My all time favorite story of a doomed AAA title would be this fantastic article from Polygon about "Homefront", that terrible CoD clone. Imagine the absolute worst developer working conditions you can, and then triple that. That's how bad things get at Kaos studios.

This was what I immediately thought of when I read the title of the thread. Fantastic article that really explores every detail and gives you a thorough understanding of just how and why flawed games like this get made.

I'm on my phone so it's a bit of a pain in the ass to link to things, but there's got to be an article or two out there about the debacle that was Too Human. The long production time, the over hyped coverage, and finally the absolutely underwhelming final product made for an interesting crash-and-burn story.

I think the biggest flaw holding it back was the feel of the combat. It was swift and fluid, but never felt as fun as it should have. It seems like the devs tried to make it so fluid that it didn't really have the impact it should have.

Crashing the economy isn't far off. The entire video games market segment crashed and burnt, and one of the causes was low-quality games being pumped out which contributed to video games being seen as a fad. Or so the internet has told me.

As the others said, not totally off base. People did think games would never recover from their 1983 crash. But my favorite part of the ET story is how the got rid of the extras- dumping them in the desert with concrete. Awesome!

Someday I really need to break down and try it out. After watching Spoony's "review" of it, I think I begin to understand why some people found it so completely unplayable, but I haven't confirmed my theories with real playing. For instance, everyone (including Spoony, so it's not like I got this from him) says they can't help but fall into pits, but it looks to me like the answer is that once you come out of the pit, you need to keep your head up, levitating, until you are clear; you do not simply start out on the main overworld screen clear of the pit. So the reason why people sometimes fall in and sometimes don't has to do with how quickly they put their head down after escaping.

I've read so many takedowns of that game over the years but after watching it in motion I found myself wondering if it's just being played wrong, and was a game where reading the manual was mandatory (never popular even back then, now hardly something we even consider doing).

A friend of mine had it back when I was in fifth or six grade (which dates this story back to 1993 or so). Without the manual, it's about a step away from impossible -- there is zero prompt as to what you're supposed to be doing, so it's just you walking around and falling in pits while a timer runs down. What's the timer for? What do I have to accomplish? Where are all these mutant gophers digging pits everywhere? All are questions you have no way of answering through the game's own narrative.

By comparison, Pitfall also had an undefined premise for someone jumping in with no background info, but you at least knew that you had to go either left or right, that jumping was an option, you probably had to jump onto that rope thing to get over that watery stuff, and that scorpion thing is probably not just walking over to say "Howdy." With E.T., you were just randomly walking around and falling into pits.

Oh, just to be clear, by no means am I saying it is anything other than bad. I'm just wondering if perhaps it wasn't as bad as it was said to be, if you do read the manual. To modern eyes it looks insane, but I've played a few other games from that era that are similarly insane without the manual. The Atari 2600 was not a great adventure console...

I showed ET to my students this semester (18-20 year old college kids in a media industries class). They couldn't believe that games actually looked like that. And couldn't tell the difference between a bad Atari game (ET) and a good one. Silly (non-gamer) kids, all about graphics these days.

I'm actually playing through it right now and I would love to read a more recent look back. A number of Trespasser's features have found their way into other games MUCH later. It's still a turd for all the reasons mentioned in the above article, but in many ways it's a landmark as well. I half want to say it's aged into a better game.

A decent article on Hellgate: London. Which is one of the biggest diappointments in my gaming career. Though they fail to highlight how much of a buggy mess that game was upon release and the failure to provide any sort of acceptable patch even months after it came out.

I highly recommend the Machinima series "All Your History". They don't focus on "what went wrong", but by looking at the history of different companies, you hear things about the politics and personalities behind it. A lot of times it comes into territories of "what went wrong" as well. Off the top of my head, Rare and idSoft are good series on this, and their recent look at Nintendo - specifically the gamecube.

My only issue is that they almost always stay overwhelmingly positive at the end of them as they're usually released in correlation with an upcoming hyped up release from said company. There are occasions where they focus on companies that were just outright failures, though.

if you refuse to read kotaku, then dont read the article? if you want to read it, click the link and give them ad revenue for something you are willing to go to the site for. It doesnt sound to difficult

The chance to bring to life a dream you may have had as a kid? The chance to make others happy through your works? Sure its hell making it, but like any career of creation, its a love hate thing. The love definitely will outweigh the hate if done right.

If that were true, we'd see a lot more elderly game developers. Painters, directors, writers, musicians - all occupations of creation - often work until they die, or at least until old age. Game developers retire in their 40s or 50s. That's very early burnout for any career. I agree that's why they pursue it in the first place, but I don't agree that the love will outweigh the hate - I think they may love it, but I think eventually the hell outweighs the love.

There's the flip side of things that these stories don't show. Valve, for example, is one of the coolest companies anyone could ever hope to work in. Take a look at their handbook, for example. There's also lots of developers that manage to simply do their jobs. There's problems that rise up, poor wages and worse business practices, conflict between co-workers...But that happens at any company. Indie devs typically do well too; look at guys like Edmund McMillen or Jonathan Blow.

There's bright spots. This just happens to be a thread about the very worst failures in game development.

How the Indie scene has been rapidly expanding the past few years is great as well, the competition has gotten fierce but it's still nice to see success stories like Notch and Team Meat (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes).

Gamasutra has a bunch of post-mortems written by developers (usually indie ones). I mean, most of them aren't really games that flopped, but the developers do go into what went wrong with the game. The most recent one was Binding of Isaac, I believe.

While this might not be as in-depth as you're probably looking for, this list IGN just made covers some games from this year that didn't perform terribly well. Might be a good starting point as far as particular examples go.

This is slightly off topic, but these sort of stories are so interesting, it makes me wonder what sort of movies could be made with these. You could probably make some awesome documentaries about these topics.

Just for some perspective D2 was unstable for a month and a half at launch, had similar issues with simplistic itemization, had launch exploits that would allow duping by destabilizing the server, and had pretty clear imbalances in PvE and PvP. What made D2 great was the willingness of Blizzard to fund improvements and to allow the team to learn from their mistakes.

If you were around BBS/web during the D2/War 3/SC/SC2/WoW expansion launches you heard a lot of the same whining. Exclamations on how they changed it now it sucks! Blizz is done for, I'll never buy another blizz game! Feature X was the heart and soul of the game and now it's gone! etc... You hear a lot of it again and again. For D3 they had more of a point which might be why the voices were so much louder but as with the other games it was a good game but needed some changed. They all found their audience and now if you ask many people will fondly remember war 3. Fondly remember D2. Fondly remember SC. Fondly remember each WoW expansion. I suspect D3 will go through the same.

D3 is a much better game at 1.04/1.05 than it was at launch and a lot of their initial design missteps were fixed. Still a ways to go but It sold very well, many people still play it, and it is still a very good game. It's just not the legend everyone expected. They have a willingness and the resources to improve.

The RMAH also isn't a mistake. Some people hate it but it took the wind out of the sails third party sites like D2JSP and allows a revenue stream for continued improvement. It was an experiment and I suspect it was a profitable one. I have a number of friends still playing because they enjoy paying funding their wow addiction with D3 MF ing. They enjoy the economic aspect a lot.

No one is in denial, its just that D3 is a horrible example of a game that flopped. Not only is it a financial success, its also still widely played, going by the RMAH and general activity on forums and some anecdotal evidence like number of friends still logging in (real id).

I would like to see that graph, because no one has exact numbers of players except Blizzard themselves.

A Russian game studio who have grown up their whole lives playing the snot out of the Heroes games (the HoMM series is pretty big in Russia, apparently) gets approached to make Heroes VI. This is like a dream come true for these guys. The best analogy I can think of is this: Imagine if you and your friends got together to start a game design studio. Now imagine if Valve approached you and said "Hey, can you help us make Half Life 3?" That's the sort of deal this is. They got to take their most beloved franchise, possibly the most venerable TBS game series in the world, and do something with it.

Awesome, right?

But they got totally screwed with the contract. Ubisoft kept stripping things away from them, robbing them of creative control and demanding that they remove aspects of the game, while shoving in other things that shouldn't have been there - most notably the draconian DRM.

The contract involved things like Ubisoft not being responsible for any deliverables that Ubisoft failed to deliver on time, and the devs not receiving any royalties until after the game had sold 2 million copies (TBS games do not sell 2 million copies).

And that's why it sucks. Because you can see what happened. A young, eager game studio, presented with the opportunity to make a dream come true, charged right into it without bothering to stop and read the fine print. Ubisoft seemed to be only interested in cashing in on an IP they'd acquired for as cheap as possible, so they weren't afraid to exploit the devs for what they were worth.

The game received decent reviews (Metacritic has it at 77%) but it's been almost universally panned by fans of the series (including its own developers, as you can see). Not in the "Change is bad!" way that caused fans of earlier games to dislike 5, either. 5 didn't fully feel like a Heroes game, but it was still a lot of fun to play. 6 is just a crappy game.

So the lesson for developers is: Publishers are not your friend. The goal of the publisher is to try and find that magic number where they can get the highest number of sales relative to the amount of work and money that went in to making the game. They don't want to see a good game. They want to see a popular game. They want to see a profit. Their parking lots are paved with the bones of small-time game developers who went through a living hell of constantly shrinking budgets, impossible deadlines, high stress and unpaid overtime.

Okay, so that's being a little over-dramatic. But the point is, many unwary gaming studios have been crushed by unscrupulous publishers. Not all publishers are bad, but the big players - EA, Activision, Ubisoft, etc are.

I haven't seen it mentioned yet, but I'm sure there would be a lot of articles about John Romero's Daikatana. It had a ton of hype and an awful marketing plan, including the notorious John Romero is going to make you his bitch ad.